Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

With admirable circumstantial detail, journalist David Talbot vividly portrays the life and times and assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Even though President Kennedy in his anticommunist fervor had allowed himself to get mixed up in the ill-advised Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he learned from his mistake in going along with this ill-advised scheme and lived long enough after it to become a courageous warrior, as did his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, fighting for a better America. Talbot highlights how JFK took on the military-industrial complex that outgoing President Eisenhower had warned Americans to watch out for. Unfortunately, JFK was not able to slay this formidable dragon. As a result, the United States today oversees a global empire of military bases, as Chalmers Johnson has detailed in _The Sorrows of Empire_ (2004). Talbot devotes painstaking attention to building up reasons to doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Talbot establishes that the Kennedys had enemies who just might undertake having the president assassinated: the Mafia, the CIA, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Whoever the culprits were, the same culprits may have also orchestrated the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy on June 4, 1968. Talbot presents no conclusive evidence as to who exactly the culprits may have been in either assassination. Instead, he evokes the sense that there were plausible plotters aplenty who had the motives and the means to plot and carry out the two assassinations. Talbot's greatest achievement arguably is presenting a compelling case of circumstantial detail for more of the relevant records to be made available for careful scrutiny. After the assassinations of JFK in 1963 and of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 and of RFK in 1968, the trajectory of American politics has been downward sloping. The time has come to open all the relevant records on these assassinations and try to bring to light who the exact culprits were in each case. --Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

This book is a triumph. A triumph of truth over propaganda and a triumph of powerful and gripping writing. It is tremendously successful in immersing us in the hostile environment the two Brothers found themselves in after entering the white house, and underscoring the fact that the hostility was from their own government, not some lone nut patsy. By making decisions based on the public good, President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy incurred the deadly wrath of the pentagon cold warriors, the new world order warriors, the CIA warriors, LBJ and his minions, the Texas Oil millionaires, and the right wing nutters like the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and the KKK. The brothers interrupted an ongoing process wherein the military-industrial-congressional complex (a phrase coined by President Eisenhower who later softened it to "military-industrial complex") was solidifying their post WW2 power and making war the biggest most profitable business in the US. By contrast John F. Kennedy described himself as "almost a peace at any price president." He paid the ultimate price in his quest for peace, as did his brother. "Brothers" allows to see these facts, to see the two young Kennedy men as strangers in a strange land, isolated in their own administration after years of Truman and Eisenhower neglect allowed the CIA and pentagon to get out of control. As General McArthur warned President Kennedy shortly after his 1961 inauguration "The chickens are coming home to roost. And you just moved into the coop." On November 22, 1963 irresistible armed forces met an immovable object. They couldn't control John Kennedy so they eliminated him. Shortly after that they eliminated his brother. Now we are without great leaders. David Talbot shows us how we got here, and what we lost on the way.

Outstanding on every level: narrative power, original research, unabashed defense of a likely conspiracy behind JFK's murder. If you read Anthony Summers' "Conspiracy" (now titled "Not in Your Lifetime"), this is the best book on the JFK assassination since that book ... and that's saying a lot. I must admit that I had become jaded about Kennedy brothers' legacy over the years (and Talbot doesn't ignore JFK's reckless personal behavior), but Talbot gave me a new appreciation of just how wise and farsighted JFK and RFK were, especially given the tenor of the times they lived in.